John Beckham

About the author: John Beckham is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a daily newspaper serving the greater Los Angeles area.

The doomsday clock—created in 1947 at the University of Chicago—represents the changing state of nuclear security around the world. Scientists, arms experts, and political scientists move the hands of the clock forward or back as they see the threat of nuclear disaster—represented by midnight—increase or decrease. For the most recent update in 1996, they determined that the world was in greater danger of nuclear disaster than it had been in 1991 and set the hands of the clock closer to midnight. A destabilized Russia, regional conflicts in the Middle East and Asia, and the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iraq have increased the world's nuclear danger, they asserted. Not...